Re: Pruning the TODO list

On Thu, Jun 21, 2012 at 10:25 AM, Simon Riggs <simon(at)2ndquadrant(dot)com> wrote:
> On 21 June 2012 15:00, Tom Lane <tgl(at)sss(dot)pgh(dot)pa(dot)us> wrote:
>> Simon Riggs <simon(at)2ndQuadrant(dot)com> writes:
>>> On 21 June 2012 08:30, Peter Eisentraut <peter_e(at)gmx(dot)net> wrote:
>>>> Nonetheless, it would be a good idea to prune the TODO list regularly,
>>>> such as after a release.  We used to do that a bit, not so much lately,
>>>> perhaps.  But everyone is invited to contribute to that.
>>
>>> The idea is to remove contentious issues from the list, to avoid the
>>> waste of time.
>>
>> The thing is, a lot of stuff gets punted to the TODO list *because*
>> it's contentious, ie there's not consensus on what to do.  If there
>> were consensus we might've just done it already.  I'm not sure we want
>> to remove such entries, though perhaps somehow marking them as debatable
>> would be a good thing.
>>
>> There may well be stuff on the list that is no longer very relevant in
>> today's world, but somebody would have to go through it item by item
>> to decide which ones those are.  I'm not volunteering.
>
> <smiles> Understood
>
> I'll have a play. Maybe I should just go with the idea of "Simon's
> TODO List" - stuff I personally think is worth working on, and leave
> it at that.

+1 for that approach. I have a page on the wiki which is irregularly
updated and contains a somewhat random list of things that I think are
worth doing. I think it would be great to have similar lists for
other developers, even if they're not 100% up-to-date or accurate.

I wouldn't be averse to pruning 10% of the TODO list, maybe even 20%,
but I think there's a lot of stuff on there that's actually worth
doing, even if much of it needs discussion before it's implemented.

Novices - and even experienced developers, sometimes - tend to make
the mistake of deciding to implement X, as if it were self-evident
that X is a good thing. The TODO list can feed that misapprehension,
but isn't really the source of it. Rather, we all like to believe
that our own ideas are awesome. This is frequently true, but not so
frequently as we like to believe.

--
Robert Haas
EnterpriseDB: http://www.enterprisedb.com
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